Lost Stars

by Lisa Selin Davis

  “Right. Of course. Yeah.” I remembered Tonya’s house again, the sad little bungalow with a screen door coming off at the hinges. Her grandmother had these milky blue eyes, always kind of faraway even when she trained them on you and smiled and made you feel guilty for being able to walk around and form words and feed yourself. Tonya always wanted to come to my house to play, and I always let her.

  I came over and helped Tonya, testing the planks until I knew that all of them had set just right.

  At lunch, I preempted Lynn’s little lecture by saying, “Yes, Lynn, it’s great to feel so hungry—​and to have earned that hunger—​and be nourished by these soap-tasting celery sticks.” And this time even Tonya laughed. I sat down next to her and the other kids at the picnic table as I realized that I’d forgotten my sandwich. She shoved her little baggie of potato chips toward me.

  “Even a jerk like you should be allowed to eat something that actually tastes good,” she said. I took one. It was amazing. “Take another,” she said, shoving them toward me. I did.

  We crunched away in silence and then she said, “Who do you think you’ll have for pre-calc next year?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “I hope not Mr. Zentz again. We know more about math than he does.”

  I stopped crunching and looked at her. “You had him for trig? What period?”

  Tonya shook her head at me. “Is it possible you have amnesia?” She took the potato chips back.

  “I was just joking.”

  “Something is wrong with you, Carrie.” I couldn’t tell if she meant it or not.

  Somehow I made it through the workday, so grimy by the end that I could barely believe that there was a parallel universe in which I was going to hang out with Dean. I unlocked my bike as Tonya and some of the other kids walked by me, entranced by a discussion of future plans.

  Tonya stopped in front of me. “We’re going to the disco dance at Civic tomorrow night,” she said. “It’s basically punk covers of disco songs. Or maybe it’s disco covers of punk songs?”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “You want to come?”

  “Disco?” I said. “It sounds like an evening my parents would really enjoy.” Well, if I had different parents.

  “It’s all ages,” Jimmie said, all the sweetness of him and his skinny little body standing next to Tonya.

  “Well, all my friends are over eighteen anyway,” I said, curling my lock around my bike seat.

  “Yeah, but you aren’t,” Tonya said. “You’re in our grade.”

  What could I say to that? Wise beyond my years, but still, rather depressingly, a junior-to-be. I would stay behind in our silly school while my friends scattered across the land without me, fragile comet nuclei coming apart at perihelion, undone by the sun.

  “Personally, I like disco,” Jimmie said. Tonya was frowning at me.

  “Sorry—​no can do.”

  Tonya looked right at me and said, “Oh, well. You’ll be missed.”

  I finished snapping my hardhat into the bike rack. “I will?”

  Tonya took her hardhat off and tucked it under her arm, her hair molded into hat-head, and she seemed perfectly content with herself. She said, “No.”

  Chapter 8

  Dean picked me up. He picked me up. My mind hiccupped over this fact. He drove that battered Jeep around the block from Mrs. Richmond’s to the front of my house, parking it next to our total crapbox of a Buick Skylark that I still hadn’t learned to drive. Rosie stood at the door and said, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Shut up,” I hissed. Hundreds of times she’d seen me pile into the back of Tommy’s fake-hippied BMW or Soo’s Le Car or Tiger’s Rabbit, but never had a young man pulled up to our front door to retrieve me for an actual date. My father sat behind us in that ridiculous flowered armchair. He didn’t bother standing up. He just said, “Be home by curfew.”

  “Okay,” I said, involuntarily smiling at him.

  The screen door creaked as I pushed it open and walked down the steps as if this were an everyday occurrence. I had made out with strangers at the Holiday Inn, I had taken LSD, I had done disgusting things with boys before I turned fifteen, and by the end of last year, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a week. But I had never been on a date.

  Dean got out of the car and started coming up the stairs as I came down, and he sort of reached out for me but then didn’t and I half smiled at him and then raised my eyebrows and I let out a little “ha.” He looked straight ahead. This was going great.

  Then he, um, he opened the door for me. “That’s weird,” I said, by which I meant, Oh my god, he opened the door for me! but somehow it came out the other way, which I realized was not particularly nice but apparently I had lost control of the sounds I was making. Then Dean got in his side and we sat in the idling car. We both just sat there. A couple of times he turned his head toward me and I thought he was going to say something. But then he didn’t.

  “I’m just letting the engine warm up,” he said finally.

  “Okay.”

  Rosie remained watching us at the door.

  Dean smiled before he realized he was smiling and then he took it back and cleared his throat and put the car in reverse and backed out of my driveway. For some reason that act, pulling out of my driveway with the beautiful boy, felt like the most important thing—​or at least the most important good thing—​that had ever happened to me. Like I was stepping into, or maybe backing into, a new life.

  “Will you listen to this song?” Dean asked, pushing a cassette into the tape deck. His face looked so hopeful, his eyebrows raised, waiting for my response. Oh, how I knew that feeling. My whole life, I’d been trying to get people to listen to good songs.

  “Who is it?” I’d never heard it before: just the kind of slightly off-key, recorded-in-your-garage sound I loved.

  “This band called the Brinks.”

  “It’s really good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s you?” He nodded. I listened harder to the lyrics—​I did nothing but watch as you fell away—​as our little town passed by, the houses closer together as we headed toward downtown. “It’s really good,” I said again. “Who’s it about?”

  “Oh …” Maybe I didn’t want to know. His Oregon love, waiting for him there on those rocky cliffs, or whatever it was they had out there. I was all twisted up, wanting to hear and yet dreading the story. “Just somebody from back home.”

  The next song came on, the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus.”

  “One of the greats,” I said. “For some reason I love songs about Jesus. Is that weird?”

  “It is a little bit weird,” he said. “But not Christian rock, right?”

  “You don’t like Christian rock? What? Let me out of the car this instant!” We both laughed, the turbulence starting to disappear from the air.

  “To be honest, I have a little bit of a thing for Judas Priest,” he said.

  “Grody.” I picked up the cassette case to see what else was on his mix tape: A little on the punk side for me—​Minutemen and Black Flag, but also Hüsker Dü and Blondie and the Replacements and the Knack and Bob Dylan and Neil Young and the Beatles (of course) and one Grateful Dead song, “Uncle John’s Band.” A song so familiar from my childhood, the real childhood when my parents were together and my sister was alive. “There’s no Judas Priest on here,” I said.

  “No,” he admitted. “AC/DC, though.”

  “Of course AC/DC. You can’t make a mix tape without AC/DC.” He pressed the fast-forward button, stopping it occasionally to check until he came to “You Shook Me All Night Long.” As he turned onto Broadway, the grumbling Jeep drifting down the wide street, we started singing along, both of us softly at first—​kind of sacrilege to sing AC/DC softly—​and then louder and louder, until we were screaming the words, the windows open, laughing, both of us staring straight ahead but letting go.


  We had listened to Jimmy Cliff and the Modern Lovers and were discussing the merits of Lou Reed solo versus with the Velvet Underground when we saw Tiger walking along the road toward Soo’s. To my tremendous disappointment, we pulled over.

  “Where’s your car?” Dean asked, ducking his head out the window.

  “In the shop,” he said. “Greta got a ride with Tommy.”

  “Well, get in,” Dean said. I forced a smile. Yeah, get in.

  “Hey, Carrie.” Tiger climbed into the back. I could barely muster a “Hey” back. Did this make it not a date? It wasn’t a date, no, of course, because who would ever date me? Dean probably opened the car door for every girl. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Of course,” I said, as if it were my car and as if I weren’t desperately wishing it had an eject button.

  Dean and Tiger talked about electric guitars (I had almost never used an amp and didn’t really get the fascination with the Marshall Stack) and cool towns in Oregon (now my least favorite state), and they smoked Marlboros, and Dean handed his to me and I took a puff and handed it back. This, the tiniest act of intimacy, made me warm all over. Or maybe it was just the smoke.

  When we walked into Soo’s, Tommy called out to me, “Rye Bread, I saw you on your bike with a hardhat!” He put on “Le Freak” and started singing geek out instead of freak out. “I didn’t know you were auditioning for the Village People.”

  I froze, wishing Dean wasn’t there to see or hear this.

  “Well, yeah, some of us have to work for a living” was my only retort. It was hard to make someone feel bad about driving a BMW, even a vintage one with a tapestry staple-gunned to the ceiling. I knew his parents had spent a bunch of money getting it restored and that the tapestry was just for show.

  The truth was, none of them, except for Soo and Greta, had been inside my house, and only Soo really knew me, knew the star-loving nerd I was in, well, in my real life. Somewhere in this world, on the other side of the universe, my real life was taking place.

  Dean went over to the stereo and put on the Village People’s “YMCA.”

  The evening passed by much in the way it had for months, years: records and singing and playing music and drinking and drugs and boyfriends and girlfriends making out, with me occasionally taking my notebook from my worn leather backpack and jotting down lyrics or song ideas or recalculating to find the distance of Vira, now approaching some twenty-six million miles away. I was still in love with the way Lynn’s pen felt in my hand—​so what if he’d told me to give it back? But this time I didn’t do the drinking or the drugs, and I didn’t do the making out, even though Tommy made a loose attempt at a proposition in his intoxicated rubbery way—“Rye Bread, come over here,” patting the pleather with a droopy, come-hither look.

  No, this time I watched. I picked out a couple of records—​R.E.M.’s “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” and the B-52’s—​and sat down with a cup of tonic water (the basement had a fully stocked bar with all the accoutrements) and saw how Dean was comfortable, in that awkward way he had, hanging out with a bunch of kids he hadn’t known a month ago. They had taken him in the way they had me: the Lost Souls Club.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about a band name,” Dean said, sliding next to me on the couch.

  “What, you don’t like Piece of Toast?”

  He smiled and said, “We should have a band called Supernova.”

  “Not bad,” I said. “What kind of music do we play?”

  “Oh, glam rock, I would think. We’re going to have to wear glitter and rainbow wigs.”

  Dean had on that same striped rugby shirt and cutoffs like mine. “I can’t imagine you in glitter.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I might surprise you,” he said. He looked right at me and smiled, and I melted into the red pleather. When? When was he going to surprise me?

  Chapter 9

  I really hadn’t planned it that way, but in the morning, Dean pulled out of his driveway in the Jeep just as I hopped on my bike.

  “Hey,” he said, with the familiar nod of his head. I had known him for a whole month now, 1/192 of my life, and I had memorized the way his cheeks got all mottled when he blushed and how he cleared his throat before he sang and the exact angle of his chin when he jutted it forward to say hey.

  “Hey,” I said back, as if I were his buddy. I was beginning to lose hope. Or maybe I’d lost it. Nothing was ever going to happen. He just wanted to be friends. Okay, we’d be friends. I would constantly be in pain, it was true, but we could be friends.

  He didn’t get out of the car. The driver’s-side window was open, and he rested his arm on it. “We’re going to play at Soo’s tonight. Test the soundproofing.”

  “You are? Cool.” It was sort of like he was inviting me and also sort of like he was just telling me for informational purposes.

  “No, we are. You are too.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. I was hoping you were too. You are.”

  I steadied myself on the bike, gripping and releasing the brakes. “Oh, okay.”

  “I’d drive you, but I’m going straight from work.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll ride my bike. It works great, by the way. Thanks for fixing it.”

  He pretended to tip his hat. “At your service.” And then his cheeks got all mottled. “That was dumb,” he said, and I wanted to go right up close to him and say, No, it’s not dumb. It’s my favorite thing in the world. But I just said, “Okay, then,” and he said, “Okay,” and then he put his car in gear and started to drive away.

  I stood there like an idiot watching him and then he stopped the car and leaned over toward the passenger-side window and said, “See you tonight.” And I was either really happy or I felt sick. Weird that they could feel so much like the same thing.

  Tonya was at our section of the bridge-to-be, drilling half-inch holes into the planks. “You’re late, nunchucks,” she said.

  “I don’t think you’re using that word right,” I said. “That’s some kind of ancient Japanese weapon.”

  “Close enough,” she said. “You’re supposed to be following behind me, filling the holes with silicone.” She motioned to a caulk gun, itself somewhat resembling an ancient Japanese weapon.

  “I don’t really know how to use it.”

  She let out an exasperated grunt. “Carrie, for crying out loud.” She took the thick tube of silicone and inserted it into the gun, pressing the trigger until the white paste came out. “Now all you have to do is press.”

  “Got it,” I said, saluting her, which she seemed to like. I apparently was also not a whiz in siliconing; I kept putting too much in, so it spurted out the top of the hole.

  “Just confirming Newton’s First Law of Motion,” I told her as she peered disapprovingly at my work.

  “Right,” she said. “An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force. Hence the comet,” she said. “And the silicone explosion.”

  “Right,” I said.

  It didn’t seem weird to us back in eighth grade that a couple of thirteen-year-old girls would sit around leafing through astronomy textbooks the way other girls flipped through Tiger Beat looking for centerfolds of Rick Springfield. Now it was hard to believe that she and I had ever done anything together. But I did remember Tonya sitting a few rows ahead of me in class, her arm shooting up to answer questions about the color of light that a retreating star emits—​she knew all about the Doppler shift. Before I started arriving at class stoned every day, I had sat in the front too, my pen furiously scribbling notes.

  “Hey, Carrie, off your butt, you idiot.”

  I had paused for a minute to check my cigarette supply, but I didn’t think that warranted that particular word. I liked nunchucks better.

  “Okay, Tonya, that’s a little bit much.”

  “What? My dad was in the navy, you may recall.”

  As if that explained it, as if
that excused her. I went back to my silicone, this time injecting it slower, making sure it didn’t burst from the hole.

  “What’s he up to now, your dad?”

  Tonya looked at me, a glaze hardening over her face. “He’s in a rehab in Texas,” she said.

  “Oh god. What happened?”

  “Last year. He was on a ship in the Persian Gulf that was struck by missiles,” she said. “Apparently there’s a civil war over there that he failed to mention when he shipped out last time. One leg, one eye, gone.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Jeez. I didn’t know. I’m really sorry, Tonya. I didn’t know.”

  “Luckily he wasn’t one of the thirty-seven soldiers who were killed. And in other great news, my grandmother is still alive and in diapers at home.”

  “Oh.”

  “She sits in front of the TV all day drinking peppermint schnapps.”

  “Well, at least it’s peppermint,” I said. “Maybe she has decent breath?”

  “She does not have decent breath,” Tonya said. “I assure you.”

  I wanted to tell her that my parents, too, had turned into serious disappointments. Not deceased or maimed, but gone or mean. But I knew it was better to have alive and healthy parents than dead or injured ones, no matter how screwed up they were. I took a chance that I’d be called an idiot yet again and sat down on the planks where the glue had already dried, lighting a cigarette.

  Tonya came and sat down next to me, waving her hand in front of my face as I smoked.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah? I appreciate your sympathy. Rosie really is a pain in the ass.”

  “No, not Rosie,” she said. “You know.”

  I really wanted to shrug, but my shoulders wouldn’t move. Luckily my mouth was also frozen shut. She seemed to be waiting for me to respond, but suddenly I was fascinated with the silicone gun, the amazing machine with a steel trigger that could transverse different-sized cylindrical openings thanks to the beautiful laws of physics.